It’s… Monty P ython’s Flying Circus & Postmodern ostmodern T Thought hought
Bachelorpaper Marloes Matthijssen 2671 26 7167 67 1
Index:
Prologue
04
Part 1 :Pre-Python
05
The BBC
06
Television in the sixties
07
Introducing
08
Part 2: It’s…
09
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
10
Structuring the series
11
Impact
13
Part 3: Post-modern theory
15
Introduction
16
Theories
17
Two Examples:
19
Jameson
19
Derrida
20
Part 4: The Spanish Inquisition
22
English humour
24
Stream of Consciousness
28
Metafiction
32
Deconstruction
38
Epilogue – conclusion
48
Bibliography
52
2
Prologue
Always look at the the bright side side of life
For life is quite absurd, And death's the final word. You must always face the the curtain with a bow! bow! Forget about your sin -- give the audience a grin, Enjoy it -- it's the last chance c hance anyhow! So always look on the bright side of death! Just before you you draw your terminal terminal breath. Life's a piece of shit, When you look at it. Life's a laugh and death's a joke, it's true, You'll see it's all a show, Keep 'em laughing as you go. Just remember that the last laugh is on on you! And always look on the bright side of of life... (whistle) Always look on the bright bright side of life (whistle)
3
Prologue
The last Monty Python Python film, the Meaning of of Life, came out in in 1983. I was three years old old then. Thanks to extensive reruns reruns of their movies and television shows, I grew up to to become a great fan of those five Englishmen and one American: Terry Jones, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Terry Gilliam. The special, crazy humour of Monty Python captured me and never let me go, and I still embarrass myself from time to time with friends, when I’m laughing my head off and they cannot understand the humour in all the silliness shown on screen. I immediately thought of Monty Python as a subject for this paper. I’d like to combine their humour with the theories of postmodernism, thus trying to find some sort of explanation of why their television shows were universally considered as a revolutionary new way of looking at the world. It’s also quite quite a thankful subject: in all the books that that are written about about the Pythons, I really miss this deeper exploration of how their humour possibly works. And that lack of information information really created some problems problems for me when I started writing. writing. I realised I had to figure out a lot all by myself, because the few books that dive deeper into the material have long been out of print. It seems so strange to me that the information about a unique phenomenon like Monty Python, whose sketches have been memorised by many generations all over the world, is allowed to slip away so easily. The Americans seem to do best to keep the Python spirit alive: they released a gigantic DVD collection with all the episodes of the three series of shows. Nothing like this exists in Europe so far. So I had to limit myself in my investigations, as I only have episodes from the first series of the television show on old video cassettes. But ‘always look at the bright side of life’, as a s the Pythons sang. I tried my best to immerse myself into this world and bring up some sense in all the silliness. To get the unique atmosphere of the series across to the reader, I added the original scripts of the sketches to my words, as well as a CD with many sketches and songs. But no matter how funny the scripts are, they can’t express the fabulous acting or the crazy Gilliam-animations, so there’s only one thing for it if you want to see what Python is about: go and see the shows and movies for yourself!
4
Part 1: Pre-Python
5
Pre-Python
The BBC
In order to understand a phenomenon, you have to place it in it’s context. That’s why I’ll start with a quick history history of the BBC, and British British television in the the sixties. The British Broadcasting Broadcasting Company, as the BBC was was originally called, was formed formed in October October 1922 by a group of leading wireless manufacturers including the great radio pioneer Marconi. Daily broadcasting by the BBC began from Marconi’s London studio on November 14. This was followed the next day by broadcasts from Birmingham and Manchester, and over the following months the transmitter network network spread across the UK. Wireless quickly caught on as a medium of mass communication. By 1925 the BBC could be heard throughout most of the UK, and by 1927 it changed it’s name into the British Broadcasting Corporation. On the second of November 1936 the BBC opened the world's first regular service of highdefinition television. On June 2 1953, a single event changed the course of television history. An estimated 22 million TV viewers – many crowded into neighbours’ living rooms - saw the young Queen crowned. The television age had arrived. The event prompted many to buy their own sets, and it was evident that television would soon be as important as radio to UK audiences. Colour television broadcasts began on BBC Two in 1967, followed by BBC One in 19691. The BBC (nicknamed the the Beeb, or “Auntie Beeb”) Beeb”) is controlled controlled by a board of governors, highly highly distinguished individuals who are appointed by the government to oversee the activities of the Director General and the Board of Management. This BBC Board of Governors is supervised by the Chairman, who is appointed directly by the Prime Minister. Just as the BBC is under pressure from politicians, they in turn are subject to pressures from lobby groups, like the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association Association who fought fought against declining moral moral values2.
1 2
http://www.bbc.co.uk/heritage/story/index.shtml J. Yoakum, TV Guide. P. 18
6
Television in the sixties
1960-1969 was a turbulent decade of great social and technological change: numerous assassinations, assassinations, war in Vietnam, the fight fi ght for civil rights and women’s liberation and a manned landing on the moon. Youth culture surfaced: peace marches, hippies, Woodstock, sexual freedom and revolutionary new music, film and television. Television in the sixties steadily grew larger and larger in everyday life, "did you see … last night?" became the standard opening sentence for a good conversation. From 1955, the ITV network started competing with the BBC providing more choice for the viewers.
In 1960 Sir Hugh Carlton Greene, the new Director-General of the BBC, who wanted to steer away from the cosiness of the fifties, came with a fresh approach to the making of radio and television: he believed that the best ideas came from below, not above. By giving people all the freedom to act out their ideas he was responsible for a nine-year period of extraordinary creativity. Instead of the safe, conservative programming that the people were used to see on the BBC emerged a new and fresh line of television shows that reflected the gritty times in Britain, filled with ongoing inflation and fierce riots in Northern Ireland. There were realistic drama series like Z Cars and Cathy Come home and a whole range of new comedy shows. Apart from the ongoing Benny Hill and Tommy Cooper shows, there were groundbreaking fresh series like Steptoe and Son (1962) and Till Death Do Us Part (1965) that dealt with family problems of working class people in a painfully recognisable way. But the magic word in comedy was ‘satire’. That Was the Week that Was (1962) was a late-night show with a biting look at current affairs, Beyond the Fringe (1961-1964 with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore) a stage revue with such brutal attacks on authority that it became the talk of the country. David Frost, the star of that show, had his own show with sketches and songs around a weekly wee kly theme called The Frost Report (1964) and a few years later appeared At Last, the 1948 Show (1967), a platform for the comedian Marty Feldman. These last shows were written written by a whole team of scriptwriters, scriptwriters, who provided provided the stars of the show with all their material, from dialogues to songs. Five of those writers were unhappy with the way their material was treated. treated. Their sketches sketches were often considered considered ‘too weird’ weird’ and rejected, or their material only made it to the shows in a weakened way. These young men had a plan, and we’ll look closer to them in the next chapters.
7
Introducing
In 2003, the Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club reached its 120th birthday. ‘Footlights’ became a household word in British society, as their annual shows first aired the talents of some of the foremost comedians and actors. John Cleese, a law student, and Graham Chapman, who studied medicine, met in 1961 when they both auditioned unsuccessfully for a new Footlights show. The next year, when they were seniors in the club, they started writing material together that resulted in successful revues and a job at a BBC show, The Frost Report . At Oxford University, University, cabaret nights nights and revues produced produced another writing writing team: Michael Palin and Welshman Terry Jones. They started contributing monologues for David Frost and Marty Feldman, but a lot of their material didn’t get aired on television. Together, they started a children’s TV show called Do Not Adjust Your Set (1967) with co-writer Eric Idle, a former Cambridge-student. Cambridge-student. This program was highly popular with adults as well because of it’s crazy humour: absurd sketches alternated with musical interludes from the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and surreal animations from American Terry Gilliam. Two regular viewers were Cleese and Chapman, former colleagues at The Frost Report , and the idea emerged to do a whole new show together. Cleese called Palin and Jones, who just finished a show called The Complete and Utter History of Britain (1969), a comedy with the main idea to replay history as if television was a lready invented
then, like showing an estate agent trying to sell Stonehenge to a young couple looking for their first home (“'It's got character, charm and a slab in the middle”) 3. The six men agreed on the plan to work together, and the BBC decided to give them thirteen shows on their rough drafts. The only concrete information information they they needed was a title for for the shows. The The original plan to give each show a different title was rejected by the BBC, as were names like ‘Owl Stretching Time’, ‘Sex and Violence’, ‘The Toad Elevating Moment’ and ‘A Horse, a Spoon and a Basin’. The BBC had started calling the six men ‘the Flying Circus’, and after a few discussions ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ was chosen. It’s a made-up name that just everybody happened to like, and the television shows with that silly title caused eternal fame for John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin and and Eric Idle (same order order as on the front front picture).
3
http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/guide/
8
Part 2: It’s…
9
It’s…
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
The six men (from (from now on referred referred to as ‘The Pythons’) Pythons’) were tired of rigid formats and and the ever returning sentence ‘yes, that’s funny, but they won’t understand that in Bradford’ from their script-writing days. Given total freedom by the BBC, they started pondering about a whole new formula for television comedy. Welshman Terry Jones was most fanatical about this plan as he got inspired by Spike Milligan, an Irishman who was born and raised in India who startled the world of radio radio and television with his Goon Show and Q series. The Goon Show , starring Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers and Michael Bentine, was an
unpredictable, anarchic radio comedy with crazy characters and weird sound effects, that featured for example live reports of climbing Mount Everest from the inside. The Q shows were a groundbreaking television comedy that featured sketches in strange costumes with the tags still on, crazy make up and jokes that crossed all lines of decency and taste. Chaos was everywhere as sketches ended suddenly and characters started complaining about the poor job of the script writers. Jones was very impressed impressed with Milligan’s attempts attempts to break with the shape of the the traditional English comedy approach: short sketches about fixed characters, with a logical succession of beginning, middle part and an ending through a punchline. His thoughts were also triggered by an animation Terry Gilliam did for the Do Not Adjust Your Set -show: -show: it was called ‘Beware of Elephants’ and linked all sorts of images together in a fluid way. Jones combined these inspirations and explained his plans to the others: he wanted to break up the sketch-format using Gilliam’s animations to serve as a bridge between the material. The others agreed, and the team started the writing process.
10
Structuring the series
The Pythons agreed on writing two weeks in a row at home, home, and then come together together to read out out the new material for the approval of the others. The six men all slightly knew eac h other from various television shows shows they had done. At the writing stage stage of Frost Report, Report, five of the Pythons Pythons came together, but there had also been some occasions in the past where they briefly met each other: John Cleese had starred in an American Gilliam-animation about obsessions for a Barbiedoll, and he’d also hired Michael Palin as a co-actor for a movie called How to Irritate People in the Frost-days. But there was nothing more than a nodding acquaintance with each other, which resulted in writing teams that were quite predictable: there was a Cambridge side, with Eric Idle, Graham Chapman and John Cleese, and an Oxford side that consisted of Terry Jones, Michael Palin and the American Terry Gilliam who were familiar to each other because of their children’s show. After some weeks of extensive writing and and evaluation, explicit explicit styles began to surface. surface. If a sketch featured ‘acts of abuse and doing strange things to small animals’ 4, it was almost certainly written by Cleese and Chapman. When there was an overly talkative person with an odd disability that showed itself at the most embarrassing times, for instance when hosting a TV show, it must have been a contribution of Eric Idle, who preferred to work alone to sharpen his wordplay. And a typical Palin-Jones sketch opened with a slow, dramatic overview of the scenery, and then a camera suddenly zooming in on absurdities like a nude man sitting at an organ. Terry Gilliam stopped after a few times to try and explain his work in the meetings, but he was there when the material was evaluated. The new sketches were read read out in front front of the whole whole group, and democratically democratically decided upon: upon: ‘if it made us laugh, it was in; if it didn’t, we sold it to other shows’, according to Eric Idle 5. Everybody had the right to suggest different ways of improving the sketches, and when there was enough material six or seven shows would be compiled. With the shifting of the ideas certain patterns began to emerge, that were enlarged in themes and in the linking within the programmes. With the dismissal of the traditional idea of using punchlines to finish a sketch and instead preferring to flow from one segment to the other, the Pythons unleashed their full writing potential: they could freely choose their material because ideas wouldn’t be rejected anymore for having a weak ending. The Pythons loved the new, surreal ideas that resulted from this freedom: 4 5
Yoakum: TV-companion. P. 39 Morgan: MP speaks. P. 37
11
‘The idea of having characters in quite elaborate costume just coming in to say one word – ‘So’ or ‘It’s’ – in the middle of a bit of narration, all that seemed very fresh’ 6. Because the six men wrote and performed everything their selves, the atmosphere was quite competitive. They all felt some or their best writing came to surface as they all had extensive experience as gag writers and highly respected each others skill. It was really a writer’s show: if they were all really satisfied with the text, then the casting was done. Roles were distributed equally amongst each other with some simple rules: the person who wrote a scene tended to get first-say at casting and the tallest Python’s, Chapman and Cleese, were felt to be the most suitable authority figures. They were all brought up in the university cabarets so it was all in their nature to get on stage and show their own material. The BBC gave them thirteen thirteen shows, and £ 5000 5000 for each episode. This This tight budget required required rigorous planning and finished writing of the entire series, ‘because we’d be shooting stuff for show 13, show 1, or show 2 while we’re in one location, so that while you’re at the seaside you can do all the seaside bits’7. Director Ian McNaughton, who’d directed Spike Milligan’s Q-series, had to deal with Pythons Gilliam and Jones who had their very own fixed ideas of filming, lighting and editing, but they had a very good working relationship. Their main guidance for the handling of the material was the laughter of the audience of 320 people, a BBC-regulation that was a leftover from from their radio-days. radio-days. Between short bits of film and studio material, Gilliam’s cut-out animations provided the linking in between. He used photocopies from old books or paintings or draw pictures himself when he wasn’t able to find the right material material to fit his storyboards. storyboards. He cut out the figures he he needed, draw or airbrush possible missing bits and pushed them around in front of the camera, by hand. The working process process was so laborious (it took him weeks to deliver the short short films) that his his animations often arrived on the day of recording, with no-one who would have seen it beforehand, but there was great trust within the team. Together, they created thirteen episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the first one to be aired on October 5, 1969.
6 7
Morgan: MP speaks. P. 40 Morgan: MP speaks. P. 49
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Impact
The show started with with John Phillip Sousa’s Sousa’s Liberty Bell March , showing hyperactive Gilliamanimations that flew all over the television screen in bizarre situations. A gigantic foot came crashing down on top of them (a cut-out of Bronzino’s painting Venus and Cupid), and that was the signal for the show to begin. From a promotional advert in the Radio Times:
“Monty Python’s Flying Circus is the new late programme on Sunday night. It’s designed “to subdue the violence in us all”. The first Python show broadcast br oadcast on October 5, 1969, demonstrated quite clearly that the group was something quite unrecognizable. unrecognizable. It presented a surreal mix of violence (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart hosts a program depicting famous f amous deaths); television parodies (“We find that nine out of ten British Briti sh housewives can’t tell the difference between Whizzo butter and a dead crab”. “It’s true, we can’t!”).; occasions where all propriety is ripped to shreds (an interviewer proceeds to address his guest as “sugar plum” and “angel drawers”).; some intellectually tainted comic bits (Picasso paints while riding a bicycle, followed by Kandinsky, Mondrian, Chagall, Miró , Dufy, Jackson Pollock… “and Bernard Buffet making a break on the outside”); and a loopy premise allowing for both slapstick and social commentary (the tale of the World ‘s Funniest Joke, appropriated by the army as a weapon against the Nazis, who fail miserably at developing a counter joke of their own). Running throughout the program were gags and animations about pigs. In the weeks that followed, the program became more fragmented, more surreal, more violent. Sheep nesting in trees gave way to a man playing the “Mouse Organ” (namely, some rodents trained to squeak at a certain musical pitch accompanied by a pair of heavy mallets), to a cartoon of a pram that ingests the doting women who lean in too closely. Kitchen-sink melodramas were turned on their heads, as when a young coal miner returns home to his playwright father, who rants about his son’s values (“LABOURER!”). A scandal-mongering documentary examines men who choose to live as mice (“And when did you first notice these, shall we say, tendencies”?). And a confectioner is investigated for fraud in labelling his latest product, Crunchy Frog (“If 8 we took the bones out, it wouldn’t be crunchy, would it?”) .
The BBC didn’t seem to know what to do with the first first series of Monty Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The shows were put out late at night at different different times times that kept changing, changing, at times when some of the British regions switched back to regional television. Michael Palin claimed that the shows were put out so late that insomniacs, insomniacs, intellectuals and burglars burglars were the only people up. The word word ‘cult’ was soon implied on Python, as many people didn’t understand the purpose of the shows. Tom Sloane, head of Light Entertainment Entertainment at the BBC in those days, absolutely absolutely detested Monty Python’s Flying Circus and even supportive actors of the show, like Carol Cleveland who played the women-parts when the other Python’s weren’t suitable in drag, didn’t have the slightest idea
8
Morgan: MP speaks! P. 69
13
of what was going on. And apart from some returning characters there seemed to be no rules in a Monty Python Episode. Each production had it’s own shape, with sometimes a very loose theme and only a handful of characters that stopped by a bit more regularly. The material flowed from one bit to the other, with Gilliam’s animations functioning as bridges or escape routes in the show. The cast itself was as fluid as the material: the six Pythons were so chameleonic c hameleonic in their appearances on screen that it left many people wondering at home which one of them actually was that one Monty Monty Python guy. The lack of a star-personality star-personality and the constant constant confusion in the series gave the show it’s freshness and originality. As David Morgan put it in his book Monty Monty Python Speak: ‘It made the Pythons seem like a rugby team which kept changing the ground rules
and moving the goal posts, and still played a smashing good game’9. Even though it seemed that the BBC tried to sabotage that crazy show which they couldn’t really understand, with irregular broadcasting schedules and virtually no publicity whatsoever, Monty Python managed to attract a huge fan base all over the world. Lumberjacks, dead parrots and spam would never be the same again, and Sousa’s Liberty Bell March always gained a few sniggers, as it made too many people think of a Divine Foot crashing down.
9
Morgan: Monty Python Speaks! P. 2
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Part 3:
Post-modern Theory
The Philosopher's Philosopher's Song
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant Who was very rarely rarely stable. Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar Who could think you under the the table. David Hume could out-consume out-consume Schopenhauer and Hegel, And Wittgenstein was was a beery swine Who was just as schloshed schloshed as Schlegel. There's nothing Nietzsche Nietzsche couldn't teach ya 'Bout the raising of the wrist. John Stuart Mill, of his own free free will, On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill. Plato, they say, could stick it away Half a crate of whiskey every day. Aristotle, Aristotle Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle, Hobbes was fond of his dram, And Rene Descartes was a drunken drunken fart: "I drink, therefore I am" Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly particularly missed; A lovely little thinker thinker but a bugger when when he's pissed!
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Introduction
Let’s travel another year back in time, to 1968. The year of Marcel Duchamp’s death and the assassination of Martin Luther King. The war in Vietnam demanded more and more victims. May brought a violent revolt of Parisian students, a month later Andy Warhol was shot in New York. It was a time of great political turmoil, mass demonstrations demonstrations and fierce strikes. No wonder it also rumbled in the world of art. In the sixties, artists and critics started to fight against the rigidity of high modernism, and this struggle would slowly lead to the birth of a new set of ideas: Postmodernism. In this paper I’d like to examine the post-modern post-modern features of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. In order to do that, I will dedicate this chapter to a quick explanation of the the main post-modern post-modern theories. It’s quite difficult to try and clarify postmodernism, as it is a concept that appears in a wide variety of disciplines, disciplines, including sociology, philosoph philosophyy and all the corners of the world of of art. It's also hard to locate it temporally or historically because it's not exactly clear when it begins. According to A. van van den Braembussche Braembussche 10, postmodernism indicates a profound change in Western culture, an extricable extricable entity of several several often contradicting contradicting tendencies that were put together under one name. It was often used as a go-as-you-please-ticket in the mass-media, very useful for an instant air of importance and trendyness when describing works of art. This over-usage of the the idiom caused the unfortunate unfortunate widespread widespread idea that postmodernism postmodernism is nothing but a hollow word, but to my opinion the post-modern post-modern set of ideas can ca n be a great tool for the investigation of cultural phenomena. There’s a welcome, enormous freedom in it’s application that stimulates your own creativity when writing about the subject. And finally, I think it’s important to realise that so many of our cultural products are really entangled in postmodern thought. Whether we are talking about architecture, a rchitecture, fashion, commercials commercials or, in this particular case, a funny television series, postmodernism is already in the DNA. Or as Steven Shaviro puts it in his book Doom Patrols : “postmodernism is not a theoretical option or a stylistic choice; it’s the very air we breathe 11”.
10 11
A. vd Braembussche: Denken over Kunst. P. 310 http://www.theedge.abelgratis.co.uk/booksns/doompatrols.htm
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Theories
As the term itself clearly indicates, postmodernism postmodernism owes it’s existence to the notion notion of modernism, as a reaction against it. Considering modernism, there are two meanings of the word I’d like to mention here. The first is the philosophical meaning, originating from the 18 th century, the age of Enlightenment. It was based on the successes of science and technology in explaining various natural phenomena phenomena in rational rational and mechanical terms terms and in utilizing utilizing them for the benefit of mankind. The age of Enlightenment was based on rational thinking, with the firm belief that everything could be submitted to reason: tradition, customs, history, even art. “Truth”, revealed through the application of reason, was the keyword in that time. This truth could be applied in the political and social spheres to “correct” problems and “improve” the political and social condition of humankind. This kind of thinking quickly gave rise to the exciting possibility of creating a new and better society, freed from the shackles of rigid institutions as the Church and monarchy. Through truth and freedom, the world could be made into a better place. The second meaning of of modernism lies on the world of of art, dating back to to the late 19 th century. Modernism, or modern art, is created by artists who veered away from the traditional concepts and techniques of painting, sculpture, and other fine arts that had been practiced since the Renaissance. The peak of modern art lies roughly between 1910 and 1930, where the notion of the avant-garde was very important: important: a deliberate reaction against the current views, in search for the progression of art through new ways of using the notions of form and technique. According to an artist of the avant-garde, the worst thing you can do is repeat something that has already been done before. As I already mentioned above, postmodernism postmodernism is a reaction against against modernism. modernism. But there’s still no consensus about the nature of this reaction: some call it a rejection of modernist values, others rather speak of the ultimate phase of modernism. To prevent a further confusion of tongues, it’s important to notice that “postmodern” can be used in three different contexts 12: a sociological or historical position, a philosophical approach and thirdly the point of view in the world of art. They’re all discussed in Lyotard’s Lyotard’s La Condition Postmoderne from 1979, considered by many as the bible of postmodernism. Within the first first context, postmodernism postmodernism can be understood understood as a new type type of society. It’s a profound break with the modern or industrial era: instead of the focus on capitalism or the
12
A. vd Braembussche: Denken over Kunst. P. 311
17
possession of the means of production, societies now aim at a new form of power, the access to information. information. Knowledge is the key to the world, and it is therefore an important component of the circulation of goods: data are merchandise now. The second context refers refers to the realm realm of philosophy: philosophy: in the postmodern postmodern era uncertainty uncertainty strikes. Science doubts the notion of definitive values, religions rapidly loose their followers. Political ambitions have been swapped for short term economical ec onomical gain repeatedly, so people lost their faith in politics. Art transformed into a jungle of different styles, all connection seems lost. And because of this, the universal ideals of the Enlightenment lost it’s credibility. How can we trust in the happy-end of any meta-narrative when Auschwitz happened? Philosophy, as the legitimizing foundation of science, politics and art, is in a crisis-situation. Finally, the third context of postmodernism is the world of art. Postmodern art rejects the preoccupation of modernist values like purity of form and technique, and sought to dissolve the divisions between art, popular culture and the media. This results in a few characterizations: -the blurring of the boundaries between high art and low art (mass culture, popular genres) -instead of “l’art pour l’art”, the denial of the notion of autonomy in art: the world of art is part of the all-embracing cultural industry -emphasis on stylistic impurity, to accomplish eclecticism and a conscious mixture of historic styles -a preference to parody, pastiche, playfulness and the superficial exterior of culture, instead of the modernist focus on authenticity and deeper meaning -modernist issues like fear and alienation, originality and the artist as a genius are replaced by schizophrenia and the fragmenting of the subject, the decline of the genius-cult and the idea that art is based on coincidence and repetition.
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Two Examples
To be able to screen Monty Python’s Flying Circus for postmodern content, I chose to get the aid of two different thinkers whose theories can help me in my investigation. I will do this because there is no ultimate and clear definition of what postmodernism exactly is, thanks to one of it’s central premises: the rejection of meta-narratives sabotages a definitive, universal
truth about itself. Postmodernism aims to unseat such fundamentals and embraces diversity, contradiction and a good laugh instead.
Fredric Jameson
Frederic Jameson, born born on April 14 1934 in Cleveland - Ohio, Ohio, is a Marxist political and literary critic and theorist. Jameson's best-known works include The Political Unconscious , Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism , and Marxism and Form ; he has published dozens of books on
politics, culture, and literature. Jameson's neo-Marxism, with its emphasis on social and historical totality, is influenced by the philosophy of Hegel, the Frankfurter Schule and the theories of Baudrillard. According to Jameson, we live in a new era: late capitalism (or multinational capitalism/media capitalism). As the title of one of his most famous books already explains, postmodernism postmodernism is the cultural logic of this time and is accompanied by profound changes in Western culture. It is a panoramic sweep of the postmodern postmodern cultural scene, connected connected to the economic system of late capitalism13. Jameson distinguishes four features of postmodernism. The first one is the the disappearance of the the modernist border between autonomous autonomous art art and mass culture. All cultural aspects will eventually turn into merchandise in the universal cultural industry, causing a (re)valuation of mass culture like comic books or horror movies. The second feature is the loss of the notions notions of ‘nature’ ‘nature’ and ‘reality’ as a foundation foundation for the the critical and social position of art. a rt. When these illusions shatter, postmodernism arrives which has drastic consequences in philosophy and art: in philosophy, a radical criticism of representation occurs, and in art the differences between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ disappear. This causes a neverending chain of images, where ‘reality’ is replaced with a perpetual sham world, without true meaning, content or reference. Jameson also speaks of a hyper-reality to define a world that’s constructed of omnipresent phantom-images. phantom-images. Secrets and illusions are banished, everything is out
13
Best & Kellner: Postmodern theory. P. 182-183
19
in the open, screaming for attention from television screens and billboards, everywhere in our lives. This immediately explains the third feature: feature: the fading of emotions. Modernist Modernist diseases like fear and alienation or estrangement estrangement are replaced: with a postmodern postmodern sense of fragmentation and schizophrenia. When everything is turned into merchandise, merchandise, the “death of the subject” is a fact and imitation and the usage of pastiche roam freely, adding more and more to the chain of the phantom images. These hollow representations representations are the bearers bearers of a commercial commercial pragmatism. This This causes the fourth feature of postmodernism: postmodernism: the age of the simulacra. Television is a good example: there’s a total flow of images, so fast and final that we cannot respond with a philosophical reflection reflection about the interpretation of the images. They no longer refer to ‘reality’, they only refer to each other in an endless chain. They are hollow images, sham images: simulacra. To go a bit deeper into into this matter, matter, we need the help of of another man: Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida, who was born on July 15 1930 in Algeria, is a French philosopher noted for originating the practice of deconstruction as a method of reading texts. Derrida's earliest work was in phenomenology. His major work began in 1966 with an essay entitled Structure, Sign and Play in the t he Discourse of the Human Sciences and with several essays on language,
writing and speech, and literary interpretation. He has written about Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger and a number of other literary figures like Genet and Joyce. Derrida's work is most known for a densely literary literar y style: his texts are full of wordplay and allusions, and typically require intensive rereading. Derrida's work has been controversial; many analytic philosophers and scientists disagree with his positions, describing his philosophy as being composed of tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists.
‘Intertextuality’ is an important concept in the works of Derrida. It already emerges in semiotics, in the writings of Roland Barthes, Michael Riffaterre and Julia Kristeva. Intertextuality
can mean two things: firstly, it means ‘that what’s already presumed’ and by which a text has meaning, makes sense. It points to the importance of earlier texts: they can give the reader a code to understand new texts. The second meaning is a radicalization of the first explanation: here, intertextuality no longer refers to reality but only to other texts. According to Derrida, every text is written in the margin of other, already existing texts, otherwise it has no chance to originate or
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to be understood. A logical question pops up: where does a text begin and where does it end? What’s part of it and what not? Deconstruction can be seen as a form of therapy for texts: it detects the things that are a re written in the margin. Footnotes, a preface, delineation, references, even the white spots on a page, they all give meaning to the text. But it is not meant as a tool for critique or the search for truth. Deconstruction tracks down the blind spots, where a text involuntarily betrays the tension between what it wants to say (verbatim) and it’s accidental features (the subsidiary). Deconstruction leads to a radical criticism to representation. In our language, we use signs to be able to refer to everything in the world. In written language, the sign itself is stronger than the writer and the message message he wanted to spread spread with it: the the sign can live on, like an orphan who continues his life without his father. Texts can live their own way, as everyone is free to cite and quote and give birth to new meaning. When the signifier, the pure form, gets detached from the signified, the content, all references to reality are gone: what’s left is an endless chain of signifiers, an infinite trail, constant postponement: displacement. It’s an imaginary hunt for ‘the real thing’, but the chain is made of supplements and is always one step ahead. In his philosophy or art, Derrida also uses deconstruction and margin-writing. A fine example is his essay Parergon: a Greek word that literally means ‘what is beside the work (ergon = work)’, is translated with ‘side issue’ but also with ‘ornament’ and ‘frame’. Derrida plays with the notion of the frame in his essay: white lines frame the text about the importance of the frame. According to Derrida, why should you ignore the frame when you want to talk about a painting? Where begins a work of art, and where does it end? The parergon, parergon, the frame, is as essential as the ergon, the painting: they need each other to be what it is. It’s a play with the inside and the outside of things, what belongs and what what not, the essential question question when defining defining a philosophy. philosophy. Between the painting and the wall is the frame, which is on the inside and outside at the same time: a twilight zone that mocks all rational measurement. The logic of the parergon deconstructs the binary thinking that is so essential to the old metaphysical tradition 14.
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A. vd Braembussche: Denken over kunst. P. 327-342
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Part 4: The Spanish Inquisition
The Spanish Inquisition
JARRING CHORD (The door flies open and Cardinal Ximinez of Spain (Palin) enters, flanked by two junior cardinals. cardinals. Cardinal Biggles (Jones) (Jones) has goggles pushed over his forehead. Cardinal Fang (Gilliam) (Gilliam) is just just Cardinal Fang) Ximinez: NOBODY NOBODY expects the Spanish Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and and surprise...and ruthless ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion devotion to the Pope.... Pope.... Our *four*...no... *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements elements as fear, surprise.... surprise.... I'll come in again. (Exit and exeunt)
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The Spanish Inquisition
Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition. Inquisition. This strange sketch is remembered as one of the best Python bits ever. Right in the middle of another scene, three cardinals storm into the room, dressed in faded red robes, bringing evil instruments of torture: a dishwashing rack, soft cushions and a comfy chair. The cardinals keep forgetting their lines, and return throughout the whole episode to try and do their part right, disrupting all other sketches. Although it’s originating originating from the second series (and I have to limit myself to the first one to write this paper), paper), I really wanted to mention mention the Spanish Spanish Inquisition, because it nicely sums up the two biggest weapons in Monty Python’s quest to conquer the world: fear and surprise.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus was a real nightmare for the conservative, prudish Britons. Gratuitous violence, swearing, swearing, cruelty to small animals in weird cartoons and the first pair of bare breasts ever shown on screen: Monty Python had it all. But this bold sense of making television scared the Pythons as well, just before they embarked on their very first recording day: was this strangeness really going to work out alright? John Cleese said to Michael Palin, just before they would would step in front of the camera’s: camera’s: ‘Do you realise realise this could be the first 15
comedy show ever without any laughs? ’. They did realise that they we’re trying to do something completely different.
Although many people thoroughly disliked the show, quite a bit more became immediate fans. They embraced the strangeness of the humour and all the surprising elements in i n each new episode: Monty Python’s Flying circus had no formula, except perhaps ‘expect the unexpected’. A total lack of predictability was the cornerstone for both the intense hatred and immediate passion. It constantly reinvented itself: instead of a star personality, there were six chameleonic men and the weirdest sketches and cartoons ever showed in a television show.
In this chapter, I’d like to use the postmodern theories mentioned earlier to try and figure out why Monty Python’s Flying Circus set many off in a fit of laughter, and still does this very day. To be able to do this, I have to enter the world of the t he typical English humour.
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Documentary ‘Life of Python’
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English humour humour
1
British English, humor American English noun
1 [uncountable] the quality in something that makes it funny: Mr Thorne failed to see the humour in the
situation. humour | 2 [uncountable] the way that a particular person or group find certain things amusing: English humour | sense of humour : Ackroyd's often bizarre sense of humor 3 [uncountable] the ability to understand and enjoy amusing situations or to laugh at things: Paul
radiated humour and charm. | sense of humour : It's vital to have a sense of humor in this job. 4 good humour the ability to remain cheerful, especially in situations that would make some people
upset or angry: Danny reacted to these criticisms with his usual good humour. 5 in a good humour/in a bad humour etc in a good or bad temper 6 [countable] one of the four liquids that in the past were thought to be present in the body and to
influence someone's character 16 7 out of humour old-fashioned in a bad temper
The expression ‘English humour’ is widely widely accepted and frequently frequently used around around the world. People from many countries adore this particular sense of humour. But when looking for a definition of this phenomenon, only a short list of general characteristics can be found: absurdity, irony, understatement, self-parody, sophistication, morbidity and cruelty. Since no definition can be found, the question of the existence of this special type of humour has certainly arisen. George Mikes, a writer for the satirical comedyshow That was the week that was , formulates this problem in his very own way: ‘English humour resembles the Loch Ness Monster in that both are famous but there is a strong suspicion that neither of them exists. Here the similarity ends: the Loch Ness Monster seems to be a gentle beast and harms no one; English humour is cruel’. In the list of characteristics, ‘sophistication’, ‘morbidity’ and ‘cruelty’ are listed next to each other. A rather strange combination of qualities, that could be explained by travelling back in time, to the Victorian Era. The height of the industrial revolution in Britain and the apex of the British Empire. It is often defined as the years from 1837 to 1901, when Queen Victoria reigned. It was a time of many contradictions, contradictions, a clash between the widespread cultivation of an outward appearance of dignity and restraint, and the widespread presence of prostitution, child labour and the exploitation of the colonies. Very well-known is the Victorian prudery: swimming in the ocean meant undressing in a bathing machine, a wooden cart with walls and roof, that could be wheeled into the water. water. It was improper improper to say the word word ‘leg’ in mixed company company (‘limb’ was the
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Longman Dictionary of comtemporary English
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preferred euphemism) euphemism) and people even dressed up the legs of their piano with skirts, all in the name of modesty. An expression from from that time is ‘to ‘to keep a stiff upper upper lip’. It means to hide your emotions, emotions, to stay calm and serious no matter what. Dignity mattered most of all: the British were expected to ‘know their place’. They had to accept their status in the class-system, either working-class, middle-class or upper-class, and to behave in a manner oppropriate to that status. And they learned this at a very young age: everybody knows the stories that are set in strict boarding schools, with ridiculous house-rules and corporal punishment. No wonder the English have a firm tradition to escape in sillyness. Satire is very important to understand English humour. For centuries, the British have used humour - in literature, song and cartoons - to challenge political leaders and social or political attitudes. Satire is a literary technique of writing or art which principally ridicules its subject (individuals, organisations, states) often as an intended means of provoking or preventing change. Satire is not exclusive to any viewpoint. Parody is a form of satire that imitates another work of art in order to ridicule ridicule it. There are several several types of satire: -
Diminution: reduces the size of something in order that it may be made to appear ridiculous or in order to be examined closely and have its faults seen close up. For example, treating the Canadian Members of Parliament as a squabbling group of little boys is an example of diminution. Gulliver's Travels is a diminutive satire.
-
Inflation: A common technique of satire is to take a real-life situation and exaggerate it to such a degree that it becomes ridiculous and its faults can be seen, and thus satirical. For example, two boys arguing over a possession of a car can be inflated into an interstellar war. The Rape of the Lock, a mock-heroic poem written by Alexander Pope is an example of inflation.
- Juxtaposition: Places things of unequal importance side by side. It brings all the things
down to the lowest level of importance on the list. For example, if a guy says his important subjects in school include Calculus, Computer Science, Physics, and girl watching, he has managed managed to take away some some of the importance importance of the first first three. -
Parody: Imitates the techniques and style of some person, place, or thing to ridicule it. Parody is used for mocking or mocking its idea of the person, place, or thing. The line between parody and satire is often blurred. Satires need not be humorous - indeed
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they are often tragic - while parodies are almost inevitably humorous. Parodies Parodies are imitative by definition, while satires need not be. 17. But strict censorship meant that satire in film and television was rare before the 1950s: satire's comedy makes a serious point and it can be a powerful subversive tool. It's the job of satire to provoke, to attack and ridicule the powerful. So it's inevitable that it can be controversial. In fact, it could be argued that if satire doesn't make at least some people angry, it has failed. Satire enjoyed a renaissance in the United Kingdom in the early 1960’s, when government censorship rules began to relax. There was a real ‘Satire Boom’, led by Peter Cook, David Frost, Alan Bennett, and the television programme That Was The Week That Was .
Apart from satire, the English love to laugh l augh at simpler matters of life: sex and violence. The 1960’s were also the time of The Benny Hill Show and Confessions of a window cleaner. Schoolboy-humour, Schoolboy-humour, that goes back to the anxiety about sex which dates from the Puritans of the sixteenth century and reached its height in the Victorian age. These historical attitudes explain Britain's censorship rules governing matters of sex, which have generally been much stricter than in the rest of Europe. Fictional violence is a rich source of comedy. Violence is energetic and visually exciting, so it's not surprising that it was a common feature of silent comedies from film's very early days. They were carrying on a ‘slapstick tradition’ - people
falling down or hitting each other, but never really getting hurt - which w hich had been popular on the stage for decades, even centuries18.
Last but not least: the British are famous for their eccentrics, which might explain the stranger side of their sense of humour. Eccentricity is part of the British way of life. Whether you look odd, act odd, or really are odd, you will fit in somewhere. People enjoy the diversity and combine it with tolerance and ridicule, but don’t really mind it at all. Mild eccentricity is the basis of much loved situation comedies. Mavericks, non-conformists, and the person who disagrees. The late Screaming Lord Such and his Monster Raving Loony Party were much admired, not much voted for, but admired and necessary. Surrealism, the art movement born in
the 1930s, may have been more associated with France or Spain, but in comedy, the British have claimed surrealism as their own and exported it to the world. The result is a dada-esque absurdity, which can be seen as the extreme extreme version of of the stiff upper upper lip. It’s basically a non-reaction; non-reaction;
17 18
Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia Mark Duguid: The British Sense of Humour
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refusing to show any emotion. Behaving as always, keeping a straight face, whatever may happen around you. This attitude can make the weirdest things comical: when the protagonist and antagonist say serious while dancing with fish or returning a dead pet, the seriousness and commitment they express will be fundamental. So, in a nutshell, the national motto ‘accept your status – don’t aspire’ can be blamed for the typical English characteristics in their sense of humour. Whether people try to live by this rule and oppress their true nature, or rebel against it with a strong craving for the extraordinar e xtraordinary, y, that doesn’t really matter. The motto will be distilled in a cruel comfort: however hard things may be in life, it always helps to know that there's someone worse off. It’s not strange that the main character in comedy is often the anti-hero: the loser, a victim of his o wn ambitions, failing, trying and failing again for the sake of entertainment. It’s very interesting that laughing and expressing fear are closely related: just look at the pictures taken during a roller-coaster ride, or a documentary about chimpanzees who back back off from their enemies with the widest grins. When dealing with grave matters like sickness and death, laughter is often the only way to brake the tension and bring some relief. This humour which is based on the grotesque, the morbid or the macabre is called black humour, and the English master it li ke no one.
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Stream of conciousness
Bronzino. Venus, Cupid and Time. 1540-45. (Allegory of Lust). National Gallery, London
Terry Gilliam, being interviewed in the documentary Life of Python from 1990, directed by Mark Redhead: ‘When I went out of inspiration, I used to run through The National Gallery, just 15 minutes or so. I saw Bronzino’s Venus and Cupid and Venus, and the original painting is gigantic, ten feet or something. And of that whole painting, the only thing that struck me was a bit on the left bottom, the foot of cupid (-that became the gigantic foot crashing down in the introduction to the series, M.-). Bronzino would go crazy, the guy spent years painting on it and along comes some jerk who throws away everything, only keeping a tiny bit. There’s something very satisfying about working like that; you’re dealing with great works of art that people pay thousands of dollars for, and I reduce it to something as small as a foot. That says something about life’.
Terry Gilliam’s animations animations were the cornerstone cornerstone in Monty Monty Python’s abolition abolition of many conventions in television and comedy. His bizarre creations worked as the glue for the anarchic non-structure non-structure of the program. Indeed, it was the stream of consciousness nature of Gilliam's animations that convinced the other members that the entire show could have that sort of aimless, meandering feel. He worked with w ith stop-motion, stop-motion, cut-out animations: Gilliam used photocopies from old photographs and paintings, cut out the figures he needed, assembled a background from other bits of ready-made material and wiggled the paper forms in front of the camera, frame by frame. These animations worked a safety-net for the show: when a sketch suddenly ended, Gilliam took over the episode and brought the viewer to other sketches through his surreal, strangely associative animations. All the loose bits, the studio-work and the out-door scenes that were shot in a random order, were linked together through these animations in a stream of consciousness-style. 28
Stream of consciousness: consciousness: a narrative technique in which a writer presents directly the uninterrupted flow of a character's thoughts, impressions, and feelings, without the conventional devices of dialogue and description. It first came to be widely used in the early 20th century. Leading exponents have included the novelists Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and William Faulkner. Molly Bloom's soli loquy in Joyce's Ulysses is a good example of the technique. The English writer Dorothy Richardson (18731957) is said to have originated the technique in her novel sequence Pilgrimage, the first volume of which was published 1915 and the last posthumously. The term st ream of consciousness was 19 introduced by the philosopher William James in 1890 .
The animated shorts shorts that Gilliam created are organic pieces, flowing flowing along, daydream-like, daydream-like, with a twisted purpose. The actions of the animation may appear outrageous to the viewer (who is thrown into the situation without any explanation or context) but the objects performing these actions do them in a logical and completely realized way. This only renders them even more absurd. Each object/action is unrelated and yet ye t related to the animation preceding it through some sort of (often-incidental) link. An item in one scene, say a car, will play a background part and then open up to be the lead for the next scene. He often creates fully realized stop motion colleges full of images that may seem unrelated to each other but are in fact part of a larger action. When closely watching a Gilliam animation, you'll pick up the incredible incredible detail he layers his his frames with. This detail helps to tie all of the pieces together while providing a richness to each individual segment. This detail also helps to visually sell the joke and makes the action seem that much more absurd. When you're viewing Donald Duck, you prepare yourself for a certain reaction because of the unreality of the situation. When you view a criminal standing in a darkened alleyway (in animation), you're not sure how to prepare yourself because of the reality of the images. You're thrown even further when the criminal jumps in front of an innocent man and demands that he raise his arms. After a moment, the man raises his left arm, than his right one, than another left and another right and another left and so on and on. And as the arms keep raising, your emotions go from unease to humour as the absurdity of the situation goes on. This is the genius of Gilliam, being able to take a situation and play it in a number of ways before taking it in a completely unexpected direction20. Gilliam’s animations can be seen as a collage, c ollage, a very postmodern feature in art. He combines various elements to construct his own style. He often uses uses familiar images like important important works works of art, who possess a certain symbolic value. Gilliam loves to use this symbolic value in strange 19 20
Hutchinson’s Encyclopedia Evans: Packed full of goodness
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actions, to surprise, mock and inflict laughter. I’ll give two examples of his animations to clarify this phenomena. I’ve written out the scenes, so its reproduction can be coloured by my perception. The ideal situation would be to see them for yourself, but Monty Python episodes can be quite hard to get to unfortunately… 1.
Kitschy background music: little bells, harp-music. Botticelli’s Venus can be seen, just being beautiful on her shell with her long hair modestly in front of her groin. A human arm a rm stretches out from behind the shell. Its hand goes to the one bare breast of Venus and twists her nipple. Immediately the music changes into a cheery dance-tune, as if the hand switched to another channel on a radio. Venus starts dancing woodenly, frantically and falls of her shell. A new shot: we see an aquarium with a paper form of Venus sinking to the bottom. The The camera zooms out: out: it is a pet shop, the setting for a new sketch: The infamous Parrot Sketch. 2.
This is a famous sculpture sculpture of Rodin, ‘The Kiss’. Kiss’. But in the Gilliam-cartoon Gilliam-cartoon that that features the same image, the woman has holes in her thigh. The male figure suddenly starts playing her like an instrument, perhaps an ocarina: his mouth was already on the instrument’s mouthpiece, his fingers just have to be set to the right hole-positions.
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Botticelli’s Venus is a symbol for beauty. After a Gilliam-makeover, she is a silly dancing character who moves strangely because she needs her hands on a certain spot to stay decent. Rodin’s statue represents love, but Gilliam ridicules the tender pose by turning the woman into a musical instrument. The collage style of the animations and the structuring of the Monty Python episodes demolish the barrier between so-called ‘high art’ and ‘low art’: grave elitist subjects like art history, philosophy and literature are now equal to popular subjects like football and pop tunes. Literary Football Discussion / Undertakers Film – episode 11, series 1 (Two chairs in an interview set. We see two people: a smart interviewer and a footballer who is not overly bright, in a blazer.) Interviewer: From the plastic arts we turn to football. Last night in the Stadium of Light, Jarrow, we witnessed the resuscitation of a great footballing tradition, when Jarrow United came of age, in a European sense, with an almost Proustian display of modern existentialist football. Vimally annihilating by midfield moral argument the now surely obsolescent catennachio defe nsive philosophy of Signor Alberto Fanffino. Bologna indeed were a side intellectually out argued by a Jarrow team thrusting and bursting with aggressive Kantian positivism and outstanding in this fine Jarrow team was my man of the match, the arch-thinker, free scheming, scarcely ever to be curbed, midfield coguoscento, Jimmy Buzzard. Buzzard: Good evening Brian. Interviewer: Jimmy, at least one ageing football commentator was gladdened last night by the sight of an English footballer breaking free of the limpid tentacles of packed Mediterranean defense. Buzzard: (Looks quite confused… thinks a moment and says) Good evening Brian. Interviewer: Were you surprised at the way the Italians ceded midfield dominance so early on in the game? Buzzard: (Confused, thinks a moment and come to the conclusion) Well Brian... I'm opening a boutique. Interviewer: This is of course symptomatic of a new breed of footballer as it is indeed symptomatic of your whole genre of player, is it not? Buzzard: (Looks around, thinking, once again says) Good evening Brian. Interviewer: What I'm getting at, Jimmy, is you seem to have discovered a new concept with a mode in which you dissected the Italian defence, last night. Buzzard: (pauses for thought) I hit the ball first time and there it was in the back of the net. (smiles and looks around) Interviewer: Do you think Jarrow will adopt a more defensive posture for the first leg of the next tie in Turkey? Buzzard: (confidently) I hit the ball first time and there it was in the back of the net. Interviewer: Yes, yes - but have you any plans for dealing with the free-scoring Turkish forwards? Buzzard: Well Brian... I'm opening a boutique.
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Metafiction
According to Patricia Patricia Waugh’s Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction , ‘metafiction’ is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact, in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In providing a critique of their their own methods of construction, construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text 21. Metafiction, primarily associated with postmodern literature, does not let the readers forget they are reading a work of fiction. In this chapter, I’d like to demonstrate the metafictional metafictional features of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. In order to do this, I need some characterictic metafictive devices. On Wikipedia, the free encyclopeadia, I found a nice collection that really helped me out:
person writing/reading writing/reading a novel - A novel about a person addresses the specific conventions conventions of story, such such as title, paragraphing, paragraphing, plots - A story that addresses novel, which can be read in some order other than beginning beginning to end - A non-linear novel, -
Narrative footnotes, which continue the story while commenting on it
anticipates the reader's reaction to the story story - A story that anticipates -
Characters who do things because those actions are what they would expect from characters in a story
-
Characters who express awareness that they are in a work of fiction
Intertextuality is very important in understanding metafiction and the subject of the next chapter, deconstruction. It indicates the importance importance of earlier texts, as they can c an give the reader a code to understand new texts. This is essential for two important characteristics of the special Monty Python-comedystyle, parody parody and pastiche. Parody is a genre of work that imitates the style of another work, usually with mocking or comic intent. Parodies exists in all art media, including literature, music and cinema. In ancient Greek literature, a parody was a type of poem that imitated another poem's style. Indeed, the Greek roots of the word ‘parody’ can be recognized elsewhere: ‘para-’ in, for example, ‘parapsychology’ and ‘-ody’ in ‘ode’. The original Greek meant, roughly, ‘mock poem’. Parody is similar to satire and distinguished from pastiche: the latter is a
21
http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Metafiction.html
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stylistic imitation where the intent is homage, rather than mockery. Pastiche is the French version of the Italian word ‘pasticcio’, a kind of pie made of many different ingredients 22. To be able to understand understand pastiche/parody, pastiche/parody, you have to be familiar with the the subject it wants to ridicule. In Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a lot of the sketches mock different television formats, formats, the rigid structures of a certain programme. Monty Python rewrites television by mixing conventions from ‘the game show’, ‘the talk show’ or ‘the commercial’ with absurd or black humour. And then you’ll get sketches like these…
Blackmail (from And Now For Something Completely Different) (Music up-- wild applause and cheers from the audience) Announcer: Hello! Hello! Hello! Thank you,thank you,thank you. Hello good evening evening and welcome, welcome, to BLACKMAIL! Yes, it's another edition of the game in which you can play with *yourself*. (applause) And to start tonight's show, let's see our first contestant, all the way from Manchester, on the big screen please: MRS. BETTY TEAL! (applause, which suddenly stops when the clap track tape breaks) 'Ello, Mrs. Teal, lovely to have you you on the show. Now Mrs. Teal, if you're looking in tonight, this is for 15 pounds: and is to stop stop us from revealing the name of your your LOVER IN BOLTON!! So, Mrs. Teal, send us 15 pounds, by return of post please, and your husband Trevor, and your lovely children Diane, Janice, and Juliet, need never know the name... of your LOVER IN BOLTON! (applause; organ music. Shot of the organist, who has an afro and is stark naked.) Thank you Onan! And now: a letter, a hotel registration book, and a series series of photographs, which could add up to divorce, premature retirement, and possible criminal proceedings for a company director in Bromsgrove. He's a freemason, and a conservative conservative M.P., so that's 3,000 pounds pounds please Mr. S... thank you... to stop us from revealing: -Your name, -The name of the three other people involved, -The youth organization to which they belonged, -And the the shop where you bought the equipment! A duck, a cat and a lizard (discussion) / Vox Pops on smuggling – episode 5, series 1 (Scene: a chairman of discussion group, in suit and glasses. Next to him are three stuffed st uffed animals) Chairman: Well to discuss the implications of that sketch and to consider the moral problems raised by the law-enforcement methods involved, we have a duck, a cat and a lizard. Now first of all I'd like to put this question to you please, lizard. How effective do you consider the legal weapons employed by legal customs officers, nowadays? (shot of lizard; silence) Well while you're thinking about that, I'd like to bring the duck in here, and ask her, if possible, to clarify the whole question of currency restrictions, and customs regulations in the world today. (shot of duck; silence) Perhaps the cat would rather answer that? (shot of cat; silence) No? Lizard? (shot of lizard again and then back) No. Well, er, let's ask the man in the street what he thinks. (Cut to film: vox pops.) French Au Pair: I am not a man you silly billy. Man on Roof: I'm not in the street you fairy. Man in Street: Well, er, speaking as a man in the street... (a car runs him over) Wagh! Man: What was the question again? Voice Over: Just how relevant are contemporary customs regulations and currency restrictions in a
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Tiscali Encyclopaedia
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modern expanding industrial economy? (no answer) Oh never mind. Pepperpot: Well I think customs men should be armed, so they can kill people carrying more than two hundred cigarettes. Whizzo Butter - episode 1, series 1 Voice Over: (during an animation) Yes, mothers, new improved Whizzo butter containing 10% more or less is absolutely indistinguishable from a dead crab. Remember, buy Whizzo butter and go to HEAVEN! (Cut to a group middle-aged lower-middle-class women women (Pepperpots) being interviewed.) First Pepperpot: I can't tell the difference between Whizzo butter and this dead crab. Interviewer: Yes, you know, we find that nine out of ten British housewives can't tell the difference between Whizzo butter and a dead crab. Pepperpots: It's true, we can't. No. Second Pepperpot: Here. Here! You're on television, aren't you? Interviewer: (modestly) Yes, yes. Second Pepperpot: He does the thing with one of those silly women who can't tell Whizzo butter from a dead crab. Third Pepperpot: You try that around here, young man, and we'll slit your face.
A game show, a talk show show and a commercial, commercial, Monty Python-style. Python-style. These sketches are still still funny today: the formats haven’t really changed, everyone will still recognize the parody. But Monty Python goes one step further: for some reason they love namedropping. Famous composers, philosophers and painters throughout the centuries return in Monty Python, usually involved in everything but the subject they’re famous for. Song 'And Did Those Feet' / Art Gallery / Art Critic – episode 4, series 1 (Interior of art gallery. Two figures enter. They are both middle-aged working mothers. Each holds the hand of an unseen infant who is beneath the range of the camera.) Janet: 'Ello, Marge! Marge: Oh hello, Janet, how are you love? Janet: Fancy seeing you! How's little Ralph? Marge: Oh, don't ask me! He's been nothing but trouble all morning. Stop it Ralph! (she slaps at unseen infant) Stop it! Janet: Same as my Kevin. Marge: Really? Janet: Nothing but trouble ... leave it alone! He's just been in the Florentine Room and smeared tomato ketchup all over Raphael's Baby Jesus. J esus. (shouting off sharply) Put that Baroque masterpiece down! Marge: Well, we've just come from the Courtauld and Ralph smashed every exhibit but one in the Danish Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition. Janet: Just like my Kevin. Show him an exhibition of early eighteenth-century Dresden Pottery and he goes berserk. No, I said no, and I meant no! (smacks unseen infant again) This morning we were viewing the early Flemish Masters of the Renaissance and Mannerist Schools, when he gets out his black aerosol and squirts Vermeer's Lady At A Window! Marge: Still it's not as bad as spitting is it? Janet: (firmly) No, well Kevin knows (slaps the infant) that if he spits at a painting I'll never take him to an exhibition again. Marge: Ralph used to spit - he could hit a Van Gogh at thirty yards. But he knows now it's wrong don't you Ralph? (she looks down) Ralph! Stop it Stop it Stop chewing that Turner! You are ... (she disappears from shot) You are a naughty, naughty, vicious little boy. (smack; she comes back into shot holding a copy of Turner's Fighting Temeraire in a lovely gilt frame but all tattered) Oh, look at that! The Fighting Temeraire - ruined! What shall I do? Janet: (taking control) Now don't do a thing with it love, just put it in the bin over there.
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Marge: Really? Janet: Yes take my word for it, Marge. Kevin's eaten most of the early nineteenth-century British landscape artists, and I've learned not to worry. As a matter of fact, I feel a bit peckish myself. (she breaks a bit off the Turner) Yes... (Marge also tastes a bit.) Marge: I never used to like Turner. Janet: (swallowing) No ... I don't know much about art, but I know what I like. World Forum (from Live at the Hollywood Bowl) (An important-looking current affairs set. On the back wall behind the presenter huge letters say: 'World Forum') Presenter: Good evening. Tonight is indeed a unique occasion in the history of television. We are very privileged, and deeply honoured to have with us in the studio, Karl Marx, founder of modern socialism, and author of the 'Communist Manifesto'. (Karl Marx is sitting at a desk; he nods) Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, better known to the world as Lenin, leader of the Russian Revolution, writer, statesman, and father of modern communism. (shot of Lenin also at desk; he nods) Che Guevara, the Cuban guerrilla leader. (shot of Guevara) And Mao Tse-tung, leader of the Chinese Communist Party since 1949. (shot of Mao; the presenter picks up a card). And the first question is for you, Karl Marx. The Hammers - the Hammers is the nic kname of what English football team? The Hammers? (shot of Karl Marx furrowing his brow- obviously he hasn't got a clue) No? Well bad luck there, Karl. So we'll go onto you Che. Che Guevara - Coventry City last won the FA Cup in what year? (cut to Che looking equally dumbfounded). No? I'll throw it open. Coventry City last won the FA Cup in what year? (they all look blank). No? Well, I'm not surprised you didn't get that. It was in fact a trick question. Coventry City have never won the FA Cup! So with the scores all equal now we go onto our second round, and Lenin it's your starter for ten. Teddy Johnson and Pearl Carr won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1959. What was the name of the song? ... Teddy Johnson and Pearl Carr's song in the 1959 Eurovision Song Contest? Anybody? (buzzer goes as in ‘University ‘ University Challenge’ - zoom in on Mao Tse-tung) Yes, Mao Tse-tung? Mao Tse-tung: 'Sing Little Birdie'? Presenter: Yes it was indeed. Well challenged! (applause) Well now we come on to our special gift section. The contestant is Karl Marx and the prize this week is a beautiful lounge suite. (curtains behind the presenter sweep open to reveal a beautiful lounge suite; terrific audience applause; Karl comes out and stands in front of this display). Now Karl has elected to answer questions on the workers' control of factories, so here we go with question number one. Are you nervous? (Karl nods his head; the presenter reads from a card). The development of the industrial proletariat is conditioned by what other development? Karl: The development of the industrial bourgeoisie. (applause). Presenter: Yes, yes, it is indeed. You're on your way to the lounge suite, Karl. Question number two. The struggle of class against class is a what struggle? A what struggle? Karl: A political struggle. (Tumultuous applause.) Presenter: Yes, yes! One final question Karl and the beautiful lounge suite will be yours... Are you going to have a go? (Karl nods) You're a brave man. Karl Marx, your final question, who won the Cup Final in 1949? Karl: The workers' control of the means of production? The struggle of the urban proletariat? Presenter: No. It was in fact, Wolverhampton Wanderers who beat Leicester 3-1. (Cut to stock film of goal bring scored in a big football match. Roar from crowd. Stock footage of football crowds cheering.) Voice Over: and CAPTION: 'IN "WORLD FORUM" TODAY: KARL MARX, CHE GUEVARA, LENIN AND MAO TSE-TUNG. NEXT WEEK, FOUR LEADING HEADS OF STATE OF THE AFRO-ASIAN NATIONS AGAINST BRISTOL ROVERS AT MOLINEUX'.
From the earliest beginning of the show, Monty Python was immediately labelled as ‘cult’. According to the Longman Longman Dictionary, Dictionary, a cult film/figure/TV film/figure/TV show etc is a film, music group group etc 35
that has become very popular but only among a particular group of people. It was a select group of intellectuals that passionately embraced Monty Python from the first beginning, and no wonder. To get the the parody, you have to to know the code: code: when you have no clue clue who Lenin and Marx are and what they stand for, the joke wouldn’t be half as funny. Python had its share of critics. Some argued that many of the sketches were culturally elitist, alienating viewers who didn't share the team's ‘Oxbridge’ background (Oxford and Cambridge). Background certainly is important when dealing with the members of Monty Python: they all came from middle-class families, the social class that includes professional people such as teachers or managers, but does not include the nobility or the people who work mainly with their hands23. Although nobody escapes the Monty Python-mockery, from the screeching housewife to the raving Lord, it was the affluent middle class they ridiculed most. The people with safe lives, governed by fixed rules and regulations, and a preoccupation with domesticity and good taste. Even when the Pythons escaped their quiet towns, fled to University and ended up with a c areer in television, the middle-class way of thinking was still present when they came up with new revolutionary ideas to make comedy: ‘yes, very clever and funny, but will they understand it in Bradford?’. Fortunately, their own TV show provided them with a ll the weapons they needed to charge the stuffy safeness. With an entire lack of structure and constantly using elements of surprise and shock, Monty Python set out to make a TV show that made its viewers uncomfortable. uncomfortable. This was no escapist entertainment to a world where ‘everything was all right’: the traditional spectator enjoyment, usually the aim for all television producers, is undermined by all sorts of self-reflexive elements. From the start of the show, confusion reigned: first episodes where called ‘part two’ and many announcements by the BBC were imitations by the team and already part of the show. During the sketches, there are often subtitles that demand the attention of the viewer with silly facts (‘these captions cost 12 shilling each’) or inappropriate commentaries that sabotage the concentration on the acting and the story. Linearity was laughed at and fragmentation embraced: rather then developing the characters and following a logical storyline, loose sketches were connected with strange and violent cartoons that the audience had never experienced before.
Monty Python also loved to use the ‘painful things that were not spoken about’. Taboos, stereotypes and a general cruelty to everything, that were definitely part of British society but 23
The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
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were kept hidden by the stiff upper lip, for the sake of decency and modesty. All the things television usually discarded in favour of the ‘pretty picture’ and the ‘feel-good factor’ were lovingly embraced by the Monty Python team, to be able to break though the narrow reality of conventions and rules. In their show, in their world, Frenchmen always wear striped shirts, berets and a thin moustache (sometimes shared). The women are pretty airheads with big breasts that mess up the few lines they have in a sketch. s ketch. Sex and violence are favourite conversational conversational objects of the common man in the streets. When a joke j oke was meagre, characters would comment on this (‘what a terrible joke!’, or ‘we’ve done that!’). The joke itself was often sabotaged within a sketch: messages like ‘and now, the punchline!’ appeared in big capital letters on screen, distracting the acting. In the Science Fiction sketch, about a maneating blancmange from another galaxy, we see a doctor trying to solve the mystery of people turning into a Scotsman. When W hen he asks himself a question, a voice-over suddenly states: For viewers at home, the answer is coming up on your screens. For those of you who wish to play it the hard way, stand upside down with your head in a bucket of piranha fish. Here is the question once again. Dr. Charles, repeating himself once more: With what sport is Wimbledon commonly associated? (SUPERIMPOSED CAPTION: 'TENNIS') Assistant: Cricket! Charles: No. Tennis!
And to mention a last self-reflexive joke that often returns throughout all the series: In a sort of anticipation of reviews and criticism, faked letters from viewers often appeared as an important element of the show, featuring complaints from angry people and random silly messages that completely sabotage the pace of the show. Letter and vox pops (policeraid) – episode 5, series se ries 1 (Cut to viewer's letter in handwriting, read in voice over.) Female: Dear BBC, East Grinstead, Friday. I feel I really must write and protest about that last sketch. My husband, in common with a lot of people of his age, is fifty. For how long are we to put up with these things. Yours sincerely, E. B. De benham (Mrs). (Cut to another letter.) Male: Dear Freddy Grisewood, Bagshot, Surrey. As a prolific letter-writer, I feel I must protest about the previous letter. I am nearly sixty and am quite mad, but I do enjoy listening to the BBC Home Service. If this continues to go on unabated ...Dunkirk... dark days of the war... backs to the wall... Alvar Liddell ... Berlin air lift ... moral upheaval of Profumo case ... young hippies roaming the streets, raping, looting and killing. Yours etc., Brigadier Arthur Gormanstrop (Mrs).
Apart from these in-jokes, Monty Python Python has even more more tricks up their sleeve to confuse and surprise the audience. I’d like to examine some of them in the next part of this chapter, ‘deconstruction’.
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Deconstruction Deconstruction: Rarely has a critical theory attracted the sort of dread and hysteria that deconstruction has incited since its inception in 1967. [Beginning of an eleven-page entry in A Dictionary of Critical Theory (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991).]
Dread and hysteria, two words the Pythons wouldn’t object to as a description of the effects of their show. The ‘theory’ of deconstruction by Jacques Derrida also encountered a lot of these two crazed emotions: Derrida’s complex work has both been worshipped and spat upon during the years. In this final chapter, I want to dive even deeper into the Monty Python material, using Derrida’s ideas about deconstruction. His theories are mainly about literature, but I think television shows can also be seen as a s ‘texts’: they are messages directed to an audience, a form of communication with the people that were present in the BBC studios as well as the people who watch the show at home. home. In chapter three three I tried to give give a basic explanation of of Derrida’s main main elements of thought. For a quick summary, here’s Derrida himself. I would say that deconstruction loses nothing from admitting that it is impossible; also that those who would rush to delight in that admission lose nothing from having to wait. For a deconstructive operation possibility would rather be a danger, the danger of becoming an available set of rule-governed procedures, methods, accessible practices. T he interest of deconstruction, of such force and desire as it may have, is a certain experience of the impossible.... Deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all; it does not settle for methodological procedures, it opens up a passageway, it marches ahead and marks a trail; its writing is not only performative, it produces rules -- other conventions - for new performativities and never installs itself in the theoretical assurance of a simple opposition between performative and constative. Its process involves an affirmation, this latter being linked to the coming [venir ] in 24 event, advent, invention .
Deconstruction is not a technique or a method. So ‘applying it’ will be problematic, as there is no closed set of general rules. In deconstruction, everything depends on context, so every deconstruction will be different as there are many traces to be followed. It is an endless quest, as every element leads to another. Therefore deconstruction cannot be used to analyse a text: an analysis implies a final solution. In deconstruction, heterogeneity, ambiguity, plurality, 25
complexity and multivocality are respected .
Deconstruction can be seen as a form of therapy for texts. It detects the issues that are written in the margin, the blind spots. ‘Inside’ and ‘outside’ are important notions: what belongs to a 24 25
Derrida - Psyche: invention of the Other www.cobussen.com
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text, and what not? Derrida used the metaphor of the painting in his essay Parergon: where
begins a work of art, and where does it end? The parergon, the frame, is as essential as the painting it surrounds: they need each other in order to be what they are. Derrida plays a game with ‘inside’ and ‘outside’: ‘outside’: between the painting painting and the wall is is the frame, which is on the inside and outside at the same time. Does it belong to the painting or does is belong to the background, the wall? Is it a main issue or a side issue? The ambiguous logic of the parergon deconstructs the binary thinking that is essential to the old metaphysical tradition 26. Monty Python’s Flying Circus is a televised play with opposites. The team loved to blur the lines between all sorts of contrasting subjects, on very different levels. The question ‘what is Monty Python?’ is in a sense as difficult to answer as ‘what is deconstruction?’ as it constantly avoids rules, conventions and regulations and is always looking for new ways to look at the world. In their scriptwriting and acting, the six men loved to unite the most basic opposites: man/woman, good/bad, dumb/intelligent. dumb/intelligent. Every member of the Monty Python Py thon team loved to play the screeching housewives, also known as Pepperpots, who populated many of the sketches. They embodied every stereotype ever invented about middle aged women, but still never very convincing as real women: the obvious wigs, flowery dresses, hairy legs and chest hair even magnified the strange nature of these creatures. c reatures. In the strange world of Monty Python, everything is possible: obvious retards were brain surgeons, homicidal barbers craved to be a lumberjack, the luncheon meat Spam tasted fine with lobster thermidor au crevettes and pet shop owners were not easily convinced to take back the dead parrot they just sold. The following text is another great example of their play with contrasts, a wonderful play with the misunderstanding between the working class and the cultural elite. Only not how you’d expect it. Working Class Playwright – episode 2, series 1 (Opening Scene: A sitting room straight out of D.H. Lawrence. Mum, wiping her hands on her apron, is ushering in a young man in a suit. They are a Northern couple.) Mum: Oh dad... look who's come to see us... it's our Ken. Dad: (without looking up) Aye, and about bloody time if you ask me. Ken: Aren't you pleased to see me, father? Mum: (squeezing his arm reassuringly) Of course he's pleased to see you, Ken, he... Dad: All right, woman, all right I've got a tongue in my head - I'll do 'talkin'. (looks at Ken distastefully) Aye ... I like yer fancy suit. Is that what they're wea ring up in Yorkshire now? Ken: It's just an ordinary suit, father... it's all I've got apart from the overalls. (Dad turns away with wit h an expression of scornful disgust.) Mum: How are you liking it down the mine, Ken? Ken: Oh it's not too bad, mum... we're using some new tungsten carbide drills for the preliminary coalface scouring operations. 26
A. van den Braembussche: Denken over kunst. P. 327-342
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Mum: Oh that sounds nice, dear... Dad: Tungsten carbide drills! What the bloody hell's tungsten carbide drills? Ken: It's something they use in coal-mining, father. Dad: (mimicking) 'It's something they use in coal-mining, father'. You're all bloody fancy talk since you left London. Ken: Oh not that again. Mum: He's had a hard day dear... his new play opens at the National Theatre tomorrow. Ken: Oh that's good. Dad: Good! good? What do you know about it? What do you know about getting up at five o'clock in the morning to fly to Paris... back at the Old Vic for drinks at twelve, sweating the day through press interviews, television interviews and getting back here at ten to wrestle with the problem of a homosexual nymphomaniac drug-addict involved in the ritual murder of a well known Scottish footballer· That's a full working day, lad, and don't you forget it! Mum: Oh, don't shout at the boy, father. Dad: Aye, 'ampstead wasn't good enough for you, was it? ... you had to go poncing off to BarnsIy, you and yer coal-mining friends. (spits) Ken: Coal-mining is a wonderful thing father, but it's something you'll never understand. Just look at you! Mum: Oh Ken! Be careful! You know what he's like after a few novels. Dad: Oh come on lad! Come on, out wi' it ! What's wrong wi' me?... ye tit! Ken: I'll tell you what's wrong with you. Your head's addled with novels and poems, you come home every evening reeling of Chateau La Tour... Mum: Oh don't, don't. Ken: And look what you've done to mother! She's worn out with meeting film stars, attending premieres and giving gala luncheons... Dad: There's nowt wrong wi' gala luncheons, lad! I've had more gala luncheons than you've had hot dinners! Mum: Oh please! Dad: Aaaaaaagh! (clutches hands and sinks to knees) Mum: Oh no! Ken: What is it? Mum: Oh, it's his writer's cramp! Ken: You never told me about this... Mum: No, we didn't like to, Kenny. Dad: I'm all right! I'm all right, woman. Just get him out of here. Mum: Oh Ken! You'd better go ... Ken: All right. I'm going. Dad: After all we've done for him... Ken: (at the door) One day you'll realize there's more to l ife than culture. There's dirt, and smoke, and good honest sweat! Dad: Get out! Get out! Get OUT! You ... LABOURER! (Ken goes. Shocked silence. Dad goes to table and takes the cover off the typewriter.) Dad: Hey, you know, mother, I think there's a play there .... get t'agent on t'phone. Mum: Aye I think you're right, Frank, it could express, it could express a vital theme of our age... Dad: Aye. (In the room beneath a man is standing on a chair, banging on the ceiling with a broom.) Man: Oh shut up! (bang bang) Shut up! (they stop talking upstairs) Oh, that's better. (he climbs down and looks at the camera) And now for something completely different ... a man with three buttocks... Mum and Dad: (from upstairs) We've done that! (The man looks up slightly disconcerted.) Man: Oh all right. All right! A man with wit h nine legs. Voice Off: He ran away.
The last words of this sketch can be a bit cryptic, cryptic, because it continues continues on other other sketches that were shown earlier in this episode. The whole whole show revolves revolves around one weird weird idea, instead of the usual linear storyline. This particular episode features various freaks of nature. 40
The show starts with an unsuccessful interview interview by a talk show-host show-host who has trouble trouble saying indecent words. He’s trying to talk to a man who claims to have three buttocks, but, on his part, is too shy to actually prove this statement. Another quite hopeless performance is by the man with two noses, who blows his much anticipated second nose underneath his his blouse. Derrida: I do not 'concentrate' in my reading ... either exclusively or primarily on those points that appear to be the most 'important', 'central', 'crucial'. Rather, I deconcentrate, and i t is the secondary, eccentric, lateral, marginal, parasitic, borderline cases which are 'important' to me and are the source of many things, such as pleasure, but also insight into the general 27 functioning of a textual system .
To fully enjoy Monty Monty Python, you have to treat everything everything shown on screen screen as equally important. important. There are no margins margins here, no side-issues: side-issues: the tiniest detail can suddenly suddenly come back later and demand full attention in a completely different setting. The strangest things are blown up to function as a sort of ‘leitmotiv’ during the entire show and even during entire series: bits of animation, returning characters, certain expressions or customs. To name but a few: flying sheep, slides with different sort of trees, singing Vikings, the sentence ‘You’re no fun anymore!’, the famous Gumbies (disturbed men with handkerchiefs on their head with a liking for shouting), a sixteen-ton weight, the hermit who announced many episodes episodes with a telltale ‘It’s…’ and a man behind a desk on various strange locations stringing sketches together with a famous ‘and now for something completely different’, which is often followed by something completely the same. These references keep popping popping up many times times and can become become a sort of codeword codeword for the attentive Monty Python-viewer. For instance, the casual mentioning of the city ‘Bolton’ (and it’s palindrome Notlob) can cause great hilarity because it earned a symbolic content in the legendary Parrot-sketch. Because of this sketch, the budding Bolton Choral Society cannot and will not be taken seriously by the audience, no matter how beautiful they sing. Another example is one of my favourite sketches, Whizzo Chocolates. It’s an interview with a director of a candy-factory who has very unique ideas about manufacturing original sweeties. In many other episodes, the ‘Whizzo’ brand keeps coming back. Even in our world: J.K. Rowling, the writer of the famous Harry Potter series, uses two t wo Whizzo-chocolates in her own Wizard-world: the cockroach cluster and the chocolate frog sound very familiar. Think of the word Spam for unwanted e-mail, that must come from the legendary sketch about a restaurant where you cannot escape the luncheon meat. And Sousa’s Liberty Bell March will never be taken seriously again.
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Derrida: Limited Inc.
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Whizzo Chocolates – episode 6, series 1 (Cut to Inspector Praline.) Praline: Hello again. I am at present still on film, but in a few seconds I shall be appearing in the studio. Thank you. (Cut to studio. A door opens. Inspector Praline looks round door. ) Inspector Praline: (to camera) Hello. (he walks in followed by Superintendent Parrot and goes to desk) Mr Milton? You are sole proprietor and owner of the Whizzo Chocolate Company? Milton: I am. Praline: Superintendent Parrot and I are from the hygiene squad. We want to have a word with you about your box of chocolates entified The Whizzo Quality Assortment. Milton: Ah, yes. Praline: (producing box of chocolates) If I may begin at the beginning. First there is the cherry fondue. This is extremely nasty, but we can't prosecute you for that. Milton: Agreed. Praline: Next we have number four, 'crunchy frog'. Milton: Ah, yes. Praline: Am I right in thinking there's a real frog in here? Milton: Yes. A little one. Praline: What sort of frog? Milton: A dead frog. Praline: Is it cooked? Milton: No. Praline: What, a raw frog? (Superintendent Parrot looks increasingly queasy.) Milton: We use only the finest baby frogs, dew picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in finest quality spring water, lightly killed, and then sealed in a succulent Swiss quintuple smooth treble cream milk chocolate envelope and lovingly frosted with glucose. Praline: That's as maybe, it's still a frog. Milton: What else? Praline: Well don't you even take the bones out? Milton: If we took the bones out it wouldn't be crunchy would it? Praline: Superintendent Parrot ate one of those. Parrot: Excuse me a moment. (exits hurriedly) Milton: It says 'crunchy frog' quite clearly. Praline: Well, the superintendent thought it was an almond whirl. People won't expect there to be a frog in there. They're bound to think it's some form of mock frog. Milton: (insulted) Mock frog? We use no artificial preservatives or additives of any kind! Praline: Nevertheless, I must warn you that in future you should delete the words 'crunchy frog', and replace them with the legend 'crunchy raw unboned real dead frog', if you want to avoid prosecution. Milton: What about our sales? Praline: I'm not interested in your sales, I have to protect the general public. Now how about this one. (superintendent enters) It was number five, wasn't it? (superintendent nods) Number five, ram's bladder cup. (exit superintendent) What kind of confection is this? Milton: We use choicest juicy j uicy chunks of fresh Cornish ram's bladder, emptied, steamed, flavoured with sesame seeds whipped into a fondue and garnished with lark's vomit. Praline: Lark's vomit? Milton: Correct. Praline: Well it don't say nothing about that here. Milton: Oh yes it does, on the bottom of the box, after monosodium glutamate. Praline: (looking) Well I hardly think this is good enough. I think it would be more appropriate if the box bore a large red label ‘warning lark's vomit’. Milton: Our sales would plummet. Praline: Well why don't you move into more conventional areas of confectionery, like praline or lime cream; a very popular flavour I'm led to understand. (superintendent enters) I mean look at this one, 'cockroach cluster', (superintendent exits) 'anthrax ripple'. What's this one, 'spring surprise'?
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Milton: Ah - now, that's our speciality - covered with darkest creamy chocolate. When you pop it in your mouth steel bolts spring out and plunge straight through both cheeks. Praline: Well where's the pleasure in that? If people place a nice chocky in their mouth, they don't want their cheeks pierced. In any case this is an inadequate description of the sweetmeat. I shall have to ask you to accompany me to the station. Milton: (getting up from desk and being led away) It's a fair cop. Praline: Stop talking to the camera. Milton: I'm sorry. (Superintendent Parrot enters the room as Inspector Praline and Milton leave, and addresses the camera.) Parrot: If only the general public would take more care when buying its sweeties, it would reduce the number of man-hours lost to the nation and they would spend less time having their stomachs pumped and sitting around in public lavatories. Announcer: The BBC would like to apologize for the extremely poor quality of the next announcement, only he's not at all well. Parrot: We present 'The Dull Life of a City Stockbroker' (as the next sketch).
Many ‘great names’ of cultural history have a firm place within Monty Python: Attilla the Hun and Mozart both love to host all sorts of tacky game shows, Cardinal Richelieu loves to drop by regularly and Picasso challenges colleagues like Kandinsky and Braque in a paintingby-bike competition. Spot the Braincell-quiz (live at the Hollywood Bowl, 1982) Quizmaster: Ha ha ha ... ha ha ha. Good evening, Madam! And your name is? Pepperpot: Yes, Michael. Quizmaster: Ha ha ha! Jolly good -- and what is your name? Pepperpot: I go to church regularly. Quizmaster: Ha ha ha, I see. And which particular prize do you have eyes for for this evening? P: I'd like the blow on the head. Q: The blow -- on the head! P: Yes, just there, where it hurts. Q: Jolly good! Well now Madam your your first question for the blow on the head this evening is: Which great opponent of Cartesian dualism resists the reduction of psychological phenomena to a physical state and insists there is no point of contact between the extended and the unextended? P: I don't know that. Q: Well -- have a guess! P: Oh... Henri Bergson? Q: ...is the correct correct answer! (Piano chords) P: Ooh, that was lucky. I never even heard of him.
This namedropping, namedropping, which I mentioned mentioned earlier in the Metafiction-chapter Metafiction-chapter (in (in this case it’s John John Cleese’s favourite philosopher Hernri Hernri Bergson) is a parasitic use of symbolic value, one of the main postmodern features. Against the drive toward militant innovation and originality, postmodernists postmodernists embraced tradition and techniques of quotation and pastiche. While the modernist artist aspired to create monumental works and a unique style and the avant-garde movements wanted to revolutionize art and society, postmodernists were more ironic and playful,
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eschewing concepts like ‘genius’, ‘creativity’ ‘c reativity’ and even ‘author’28. Monty Python’s references to famous names, but also the use of all sorts of television-images in short flashes and the collagelike animations can be compared with to a musical technique: sampling, which is taking a portion of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument in a new recording. For instance, using a Beethoven-theme in a rap song immediately ads a certain distinct atmosphere which can be exploited and played with in new material. Sampling foregrounds the pastiche quality of narration in sound and vision. As we’ve seen earlier this chapter, pastiche (or parody, the distinction is quite vague) refers to an imitation of a previous work of art or a style that composes using recognizable part of other styles. While the modernist historical canonization of works of art takes them out of their context and makes them appear to be the organic productions of a single (ingenious) mind, all works of art have emerged as parts of multiple conversations, both private and public. In the postmodern era, concepts like authenticity, meaning and originality were not so important any more. With gigantic, evergrowing libraries of sound, image and video recordings available that can be easily accessible through the internet, sampling quickly became a popular tool. Any material can be juxtaposed or strung out in succession to form an audio and/or visual narrative. Finally, very important in deconstruction is the notion of inside/outside. What belongs, and what does not? This is also an important i mportant concept in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The things you normally don’t see when watching TV really play a significant role in the televised revolution that is Monty Python. Many actions are needed in order to make a television show: a script has to be written with real characters characters and believable believable storylines, actors actors have to be cast and a whole crew is needed for recording: cameramen, sound and lighting-engineers, costume-designers and a director. Everything is aimed at creating a perfect illusion: the people at home have to believe in the characters and the situations shown on screen, in order to sympathize with them and feel the need to watch other episodes as well. The strength of Monty Python is that they never wanted to create this perfect illusion: all aspects of the show emphasize the message ‘this is only television folks!’. In their material, the invented world of Monty Python, many elements of the reality behind it all, the technical aspects of creating television, are not stashed away but often put in the spotlights! There’s a constant sense sense of fragmentation in the show: sketches sketches end suddenly and arbitrary, arbitrary, with the characters in it often complaining about this, (‘I’m not going to sleep with that producer 28
Best & Kellner: Postmodern theory
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again’ (John Cleese), suggesting better endings or just wandering off, doing something for themselves or chat casually with the other people around. In Monty Python, the characters really seem to lead a life of their own: when they feel neglected or maltreated in the show, they sometimes sabotage other sketches. Also, the fine line between the actors and the characters they portray is often blurred: when the camera focuses on them, they sometimes aren’t fully prepared to play the scene and stumble over their lines. The names of the characters and the names of the actors get mixed up sometimes: there are many sketches that feature the Monty Python members as schoolboys of about nine years old, being interviewed about what they would like to see in a television sketch. And sometimes, the people on screen aren’t even in character yet, they are still preparing themselves when something strange happens to the scene they’re supposed to be in. The next sketch is a great example of this, an endless endless discussion of hermits about cave decoration decoration and life in the country. All this nagging is suddenly interrupted by The Colonel, a character that inhabits quite a lot of episodes in the first season. Angry because of the silly humour of the show, the great amount of badly written sketches and the fact that he doesn’t get the funny lines makes him stop other sketches when there’s too much nonsense. Hermits (the last part) – episode 8, series 1 Fifth Hermit: (calling from a distance) Frank! Second Hermit: Yes Han. Fifth Hermit: Can I borrow your goat? Second Hermit: Er, yes that'll be all right. Oh leave me a pint for breakfast will you? ... (to first hermit) You see, you know that is the trouble with living half way up a cliff - you feel so cut off. You know it takes me two hours every morning to get out onto the moors, collect my berries, chastise myself, and two hours back in the evening. First Hermit: Still there's one thing about being a hermit, at least you meet people. Second Hermit: Oh yes, I wouldn't go back to public relations. First Hemit: Oh well, bye for now Frank, must toddle. Colonel: Right, you two hermits, stop that sketch. I think it's silly. Second Hermit: What? Colonel: lt's silly. Second Hermit What do you mean, you can't stop it - it's on film. Colonel: That doesn't make any difference to the viewer at home, does it? Come on, get out. Out. Come on out, all of you. Get off, go on, all of you. Go on, move, move. Go on, get out. Come on, get out, move, move. (He shoos them and the film crew off the hillside. We see the camera crew and John Cleese fully dressed as a hermit who still had to play his part.)
This colonel loves to show off his power power by talking directly directly to the director, director, giving him instructions to settle things straight. Army Protection Racket (fragment) – episode 8, series 1 Colonel: Are you threatening me? Dino: Oh, no, no, no.
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Luigi: Whatever made you think that, Colonel? Dino: The Colonel doesn't think we're nice people, Luigi. Luigi: We're your buddies, Colonel. Dino: We want to look after you. Colonel: Look after me? Luigi: We can guarantee you that not a single armoured division will get done over… for fifteen bob a week. Colonel: No, no, no. Luigi: Twelve and six. Colonel: No, no, no. Luigi: Eight and six ... five bob... Colonel: No, no this is silly. Dino: What's silly? Colonel: No, the whole premise is silly and it's very badly written. I'm the senior officer here and I haven't had a funny line yet. So I'm stopping it. Dino: You can't do that! Colonel: I've done it. The sketch is over. Watkins: I want to leave the army please sir, it's dangerous. Colonel: Look, I stopped your sketch five minutes ago. So get out of shot. Right, director! Close up. Zoom in on me. (camera zooms in) That's better. Luigi: (off screen) It's only 'cos you couldn't think of a punch line. Colonel: Not true, not true. It's time for the cartoon. Cue telecine, ten, nine, eight... (Cut to telecine countdown.) Dino: (off screen) The general public's not going to understand 'this, are they? Colonel: (off screen) Shut up you eyeties!
In the world of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, nothing is certain. Everything is challenged, even the most basic rules of creating television. That’s why so many people immediately adored Monty Python: because of the exciting sense that you would see something completely different each episode and were allowed to laugh at everything, even the most cruel and/or simple stuff. It was all tied together in a format-less format, resulting in highly successful television series, books, records and movies that are still popular today. Because it tackles every subject in it’s very own way, Monty Python cannot cannot be copied. Many comedians from from the next generation generation struggled with this legacy: many sketches they practiced would be abandoned for fear of being ‘too Pythonesque’. But what is Pythonesque? To me, it’s that wonderfully overwhelming overwhelming sense of strangeness that immediately sets in, a special kind of humour which I tried to analyse a bit in this paper. But when I’m approaching the final stage of it, I realise that trying to pinpoint ‘why is this so funny’ is like trying to grasp a slippery eel, or following an endless trail of references: it is so special because it dares to makes fun of so many conventions, renewing itself constantly constantly and still be recognizable. Think of the use of the coconuts in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: as soon as you see the men in knightly outfits, hopping through through the fields and banging coconut shells together to make a clip-clop sound, sound, and all this with a straight face, you’ll immediately be in a special kind of liberating mood that can last a very long time. As John Cleese puts it: ‘The nicest
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thing anybody ever said about Python was that they could never watch the news after it. You get in a certain frame of mind and then almost anything is funny!’ 29.
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Morgan: Monty Python Speaks! P. 71
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Epilogue: Conclusion
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Conclusion
The goal of this paper paper was to find some some sort of explanation explanation why Monty Python’s Python’s Flying Circus was considered to be a televised televised revolution. revolution. I wanted to find find out why their specific kind of humour was so special and effective, as it touched people from all over the world. And this was not just in the early seventies: the work of the six Pythons remains popular even still. When working on this paper, I encountered encountered a lot of problems. I was surprised surprised that it was so hard hard to find useful literature on the subject of humour: tragedy is over-analysed, but humour seems to be taken for granted or treated as something trivial. Interesting subjects such as ‘black humour’, ‘satire’ and the different kinds of humour in various countries must be discussed somewhere, but it seems that you y ou only encounter them by stumbling upon them by sheer coincidence. Thankfully, the internet is a useful tool in dealing with coincidence: by clicking on lots of different links you can suddenly encounter the most useful things. By chance, I got in c ontact with two people who helped me a lot with this subject: Drs. Franca Jonquiere of the University of Amsterdam (UVA) provided me with her interesting lecture about the humour of Monty Python, and Katrina G. Boyd of Indiana University kindly mailed me her article ‘Pastiche and Postmodernism in Brazil’ and chapters of the book she’s currently writing about the work of Terry Gilliam, which helped me a lot in dealing with the postmodern tools effectively. And the postmodern postmodern tools were useful useful indeed. Monty Python’s Python’s chameleonic nature nature can only be tackled by postmodern theories, that allow a great freedom in application. Postmodernism aims to unseat stern fundamentals such as truth and purity and embraces diversity, contradiction and a good laugh instead. Exactly the aims of the television show. The collage-technique proved extremely useful for discussing the value of the cartoons within the programme. The strange and violent animations were not only the the ‘face’ of the show show (as the actors loved loved dressing up so much much that they were barely recognizable), they provided the series with a unique structure: a stream-ofconsciousness flow, a daydream-like linking of different subjects that resulted in a total freedom of material and many surprised people in front of the television. Nobody was safe in Monty Python: the six men loved to shock with sex, violence and random silliness, smashing the borders of decency and good taste. Philosophy, high art and politics were suddenly subject to laughter, next to jokes about dancing with fish and flying sheep.
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Monty Python rewrote TV by mixing the conventions from all sorts of TV-formats with the most inappropriate subjects, mocking the traditional class system with it’s separate furnished cubicles for different kinds of people. And they even went beyond that: from time to time they ignored some of the most basic rules of making television, creating an unpredictable, and for many people ‘uncomfortable’ comedy show. You never knew what to expect, as the programme seemed to play a game with it’s viewers. Joked were half-finished or were repeated so much that it became annoying, characters would suddenly go on strike and stop acting seriously. Monty Python’s Flying Circus can be seen as a form of sabotage-TV. Nothing was taken seriously, not even themselves, and because of that they were able to use all sorts of taboo-subjects and liberate television. In order to examine these guerrilla-techniques, I tried to used different angles. I already mention the discussion about collage and stream of conciousness, but I also employed some of the main theories of two great Postmodern thinkers, Fredric Jameson and Jacques Derrida. Jameson helped me me to deal with the subject subject of fragmentation fragmentation in Monty Monty Python. Especially in the the first series, the show consisted of very short bits of acting, film and animation, that were put together in a very fast pace, stream-of-consciousness style. This results in a distinct flow, that no longer refers to reality. Monty Python didn’t even aim at trying to create an inner reality: the show can be seen as an a n endless chain of references, all sorts of parodies or pastiches. When dealing with Monty Python, Python, the distinction is hard to make as it is not always clear if they they imitate in order to mock or to pay an homage. The Oxbridge boys incorporated lots of things in their show they really loved themselves, like slapstick, mime and various expressions of history, art and philosophy. The TV show can be seen as a journey through absurdity by various self-reflexive self-reflexive ways. The idea of the chain brought brought me me to Derrida. Using Using a very basic form of his difficult concept of deconstruction, I tried to dive deeper into the material. I discovered that thinking about ‘what is written in the margin’ margin’ provided a great great clue for the the popularity of Monty Python. By treating treating everything as equally important, the team was able to tackle an endless amount of subjects for their show. Many critics were amazed by the scriptwriting: one episode of the Flying Circus featured ideas for a dozen new television series. Because of their format-less format, everything was possible in the short short bits the episodes episodes were built of, even sabotaging the basic rules rules of making TV. A televised play with opposites, that felt fresh and exciting. Monty Python was not so much about jokes, but about an entirely different state of mind: I think the series and the
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movies became so enormously popular because you soon felt part of an in-crowd, a sense of belonging to a select group of people that dared to laugh with these rebellious young men and by doing that shake off many stuffy regulations. Seeing one show would only astonish, but seeing more meant you learned certain codes. Because of the sheer unexpectedness all around, the elements that did return from time to time felt like codewords: a sort of extra, hidden jokes that not everyone would recognize. Because of the chameleonic nature of the series, everything could be turned into such a codeword, which caused an elaborate play of references and deeper meanings, an endless chain of special silliness that continued in movies, records, books and live shows. The Pythons didn’t think it was all that special special themselves. They just felt lucky they had the the opportunity opportunity to make money with inventing and acting out the strangest things. The six men weren’t very fond of the many elaborate elaborate explanations explanations of their work work that were written written in the seventies and eighties, so I think they wouldn’t subscribe this paper either. They just wanted to be creative in all sorts of media, exploring the boundaries of laughter and comedy. I’d like to end with an appropriate appropriate quote of David Morgan, the author of the book which I relied on most for writing this paper, Monty Python Speaks. Python was not about jokes; it was really about a state of mind. It was a way of looking at the world as a place where walking like a contortionist is not only considered normal but is rewarded with government funding; where people speak in anagrams; where highwaymen redistribute wealth in floral currencies; and where BBC newsreaders use arcane hand signals when delivering the day’s events. And as long as the world itself is accepted as being an absurd place, Python will seem right at home.
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Bibliography
Books: -
Steven Best and Douglas Kellner: Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. The Macmillan Press LTD, London 1991 A. van den Braembussche: Braembussche: Denken over Kunst. Uitgeverij Coutinho, Coutinho, Bussum 1994 Richard Dienst: Still life in real time, theory after television. Durham & London 1994 Fredric Jameson: Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. Verso, London 1991 Bob McCabe and all Python-members: The Pythons. Orion Publishing Co, London 2003 David Morgan: Monty Python Speaks. Avon Books, New York 1999 Jim Yoakum: The Non-Inflatable Non-Inflatable Monty Python Python TV-Companion. TV-Companion. Dowling Press Inc. Inc. Nashville, Tennessee 1999
About the history of the BBC and and English humour: - http://www.bbc.co.uk/heritage/story/index.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/heritage/story/index.shtmlHistory History of the BBC - http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/guide/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/guide/Comedy Comedy guide of BBC-programmes BBC-programmes - http://www.screenonlin http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tours/hum e.org.uk/tours/humour/tourBritHumo our/tourBritHumour1.html ur1.html an article about typical British humour by Mark Duguid About postmodernism postmodernism in general: - http://www.theedge.ab http://www.theedge.abelgratis.co.uk/booksns/ elgratis.co.uk/booksns/doompatrols.htm doompatrols.htm About Steven Shaviro - http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Metafiction.html http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Metafiction.htmlmetafiction metafiction and Patricia Waugh About Terry Gilliam: - http://www.digitalmediafx.com/Features/terry-gilliam.html http://www.digitalmediafx.com/Features/terry-gilliam.htmlPacked Packed full of Goodness, an article by Noell Wolfgram Evans About Derrida: - www.cobussen.com Ingenious website about deconstruction in music - http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/SE http://www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/SESLL/EngLit/ugrad/hon SLL/EngLit/ugrad/hons/theory/Ten%20W s/theory/Ten%20Ways.htm ays.htm Ten ways of thinking about deconstruction - http://kubnw16.kub.nl/~ljansen/filosoof/gesch/derrida.htm http://kubnw16.kub.nl/~ljansen/filosoof/gesch/derrida.htmJacques Jacques Derrida: leven en werk - http://www.brocku.ca/en http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/deconst glish/courses/4F70/deconstruction.html ruction.html Deconstruction, some assumptions. Copyright 1996 by John Lye And many thanks to: - The Longman Dictionary Dictionary of contemporary contemporary English - Wikipedia, the free Encyclopaedia Encyclopaedia - Hutchinson Encyclopaedia - Tiscali Encyclopaedia - http://orangecow.org/pythonet/sketches/ http://orangecow.org/pythonet/sketches/Monty Monty Python in Australia: they wrote out all the Flying Circus sketches!
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